Grassroots Motorsports
Issue link: http://grassrootsmotorsports.epubxp.com/i/397024
Grassroots Motorsports 48 COVER STORY: ENGINEERING A SPORTS CAR 2. Charisma Competition breeds passion, and this is where sports cars have us all in agreement. No 12-year-old kid sets an image of a Prius as his or her laptop wallpaper; it's going to be a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, an Audi R8 or some other enticing, high-performance, worthy-of-passion car plastered proudly across the screen. Sports cars stir something basic in a car enthusiast's gut. My son said it the other night when we were cruising around in his '95 Miata–nicely lowered to autocross spec. "Dad," he said, "it never fails. Every time I pass a young kid in this car, he stares as it goes by. It never fails to stop them in their tracks." I reacted the same way as a boy, drooling over brand-new Austin-Healey 3000s or Jaguar XKEs driven by happy, smiling men in our neighborhood on warm days. So, a sports car must be suitable for competition and evoke passion. We're all having a nice discussion so far. Now let me roll up my sleeves and start getting frank, at the risk of polar- izing many of you. 3. Rear-Wheel Drive Sports cars have to be rear-wheel drive. There, I said it. I can speak with some authority as an experienced vehicle packaging engineer that front-wheel drive is never chosen for performance–unless you live in the Alps and drive on snow. Front-wheel-drive packages are chosen because a) they're less expensive to manufacture, and b) because they optimize interior space for passengers. Even if front-wheel-drive cars felt exactly the same as rear- wheel-drive cars in a 0.90g turn, this would be true. Of course, front-wheel-drive cars defnitely do not drive or feel or handle the same as rear-wheel-drive cars, and the physics of why will never change. Having opened this can of worms, I must ask that the all- wheel-drive proponents remain silent. You all drive mutants– very fast and enviously quick mutants, but mutants nonetheless, and we'll discuss you another day. This is about traditional sports cars. 4. Two Seats Sports cars also have to be two-seaters. Three is a crowd: You can only have a driver and a navigator/cop-spotter/ friend/skilled mechanic in the passenger seat. No dead weight is allowed. The goal here is to be quick and nimble. Four seats indicate practicality, and sports cars have performance as their para- mount goal, not practicality. I keep this as an integer-based argument, and I always round down: A Porsche 911 of any year has 2.7 seats at best, so it still qualifes as a two-seat sports car for me. No adult can sit in the second row of a 911 and say that it has rear seats. I have been crammed into these vestigial compartments for dozens of cumulative hours in my life, only for the joy of getting to ride along in one of these great cars. I always had to weigh the pain of the seating position against the joy of being at speed in a 911. Passion always won out, and I have never been disappointed. So the 911 gets a bye in this case. The Porsche 944 and 928 have 2.9 seats on their best days, but they're also sports cars that nearly fall into the GT category. Porsche uses rear seats to evade German tax laws on two-seaters, so their heart is in the right place. We're getting into a gray area here, but this is why the third- generation Mazda RX-7 never came with rear seaty-things. Rear seats in sports cars are like Adam's apples on women: They cause confusion. COVER STORY: ENGINEERING A SPORTS CAR